Monday, July 27, 2015

It would have been nice.

Someone asked them about homosexuals, and it seems like practice did make perfect because both had their answers down pat. In essence, they agreed to disagree. That is as it should be; it matters not that we still criminalise sexual acts against the order of nature because one day we will stop dying of preventable diseases in large numbers, we will educate our children to the highest standards to the highest level and we will have the luxury to ponder over our own share of First World Problems. That day is not today.

There were many Kenyan reporters who couldn't get over the fact that they saw, with their own eyes, the United States Air Force's VC-25A, or the United States Marine Corps' VH-60Ns and V-22 Ospreys. They were fascinated by the armoured Lincoln limousines, Chevrolet Suburbans and Ford Expeditions. They couldn't get enough of comely and not-so-comely agents of the United States Secret Service, which, apparently is no longer a part of the Department of the Treasury but of the Department of Homeland Security.

Very few of them seemed to have an actual interest in entrepreneurship, generally, or the Global Entrepreneurship Summit that was the reason why the VC-25A landed in Kenya and the V-22s and VH-60Ns were flitting about Nairobi in sinister and menacing fashion. The deals inked between the governments of Kenya and the United States received scant attention compared to the amount of nattering that occurred over the difference a tailor would have on a president's wardrobe.

The President of the United States dwelled on the Big Picture; the specifics were left to his secretaries of commerce and the like and his Special Assistant on National Security Affairs. It is curious that the Kenyan news media chose to largely ignore these questions in favour of aeroplanes, helicopters, limousines and SUVs. The Big Picture still had sufficient detail that had the news media concentrated n that alone,w e wouldn't be left with the feeling that we should know more about the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and whether it will lead to job-creation in Kenya, unemployment reduction, economic growth, political stability, public safety or national security.

Don't get me wrong; I am a guy and guys sure love gadgets. If the gadgets happen to be presidential gadgets, that love remains unrequited but no less passionate and true. But rational people know that there is a time for unrequited pining and a time for hardnosed realpolitik. Kenya's news media is owned by hardnosed businessmen in the business of making money for themselves and their shareholders. The news media houses are populated, by and large, by natterers who resemble small babies, fascinated by shiny toys and incapable of reasoning logically about matters outside the sightlines of shiny things.

For the curious among us, where sober analysis would have been welcome from the minds residing deep in the bowels of the news media houses, we will have to rely on our own faculties to track down every morsel of information from the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, 2015, and attempt to make sense of it all without losing the last of our hair. It would have been nice, though, for the news hacks to pry their snotty noses from the portholes of The Beast in order to tell us what we bought, what we sold, what we gained, what we lost and what it all meant at the end of the day, wouldn't it?

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